Collaborative Care and Geriatric Psychiatry

Clinicians treating older adults should do multi-morbidity and individualized patient-centered assessment by a multidisciplinary collaborative team, including the patient’s individual health history, standardized rating scales, and laboratory workup. This assessment allows for a multi-morbidity patient-centered individualized treatment plan which takes into account both the old age patient’s physical and mental health and aims for the same values as the assessment, namely, a patient-centered, population-focused, and measurement-guided medical treatment. This chapter describes the two critical elements of this approach to geriatric psychiatry: (1) Establishing a correct diagnosis by way of targeted foundational aspects of the diagnostic interview, rating scales, and the laboratory workup of older adults and (2) Utilization of evidence-based collaborative care models for the elderly, with a description of the need for collaborative care models in the elderly, the necessary elements, the team structure, the evidence-based models in the elderly, and the limitations of the current state of collaborative care.